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There was an odd hole where machine lifetimes got really short. They didn't used to be. An Apple //c (manufactured 1984) with an ImageWriter printer and a secon

There was an odd hole where machine lifetimes got really short. They didn't used to be. An Apple //c (manufactured 1984) with an ImageWriter printer and a second floppy drive was happily in use for school papers, spreadsheets, correspondence, basic accounting, casual games and kids learning to program through about 1996. And it was passed on to another family after that, where it was used for another 3 years or so. Mainly as a Number Munchers/Carmen Sandiego/Oregon Trail/ChopLifter/Moon Patrol machine, I think. And while I'll grant that was a longer-than-average useful life for the time, we weren't the only ones I knew to keep an 80s machine with a 70s core in service well into the 90s. Then somewhere around when people started to expect Windows on a computer the lifespans got quite a bit shorter, and that seemed to stick into the late 00s. And it's swung back the other direction now... my late 2011 MacBook Pro is good with current Mac OS or current Windows 10 installations, and is only being retired because its soldered-on discrete GPU has started to flake in a way that makes it unusable. (And a replacement motherboard would be stupid expensive.)

StillBored 9y ago
I think part of that is the abstraction layers.. The apple][ had a really long lifespan. The IIe had a production run of 11 years and was a slight evolution on a 7 year old design when it was released. During that time you were free to run nearly any apple][ application (excluding the IIgs ones) despite many of them being 10+ years old. Their functionality wasn't reduced and you didn't have to deal with an OS that changed under the applications and dropped support for them. People understood the target and the applications were tuned for it (similar to game consoles). The advent of hard disks, and installable OS environments changed the model. Outside of zOS, and maybe IBMi, there simply aren't any OSs that actually have provided a fairly stable OS API over time. Even windows has decided they don't care about backwards compatibility despite the fact that for most purposes the core win32 API present in win2k provides basically everything needed to host the vast majority of modern applications. Games might be the exception but people forget the directX was an install-able component until MS decided to tie to to the OS with vista).
- eropple 9y ago
  > Even windows has decided they don't care about backwards compatibility I can run 25-year-old Windows 3.1 applications on a 32-bit Windows 10 box and they work correctly. If I have upgraded to 64-bit, I am merely constrained to 22-year-old Windows 95 applications.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Unisys has ClearPath, going all the way to 1961.

StillBored 9y ago

I think part of that is the abstraction layers.. The apple][ had a really long lifespan. The IIe had a production run of 11 years and was a slight evolution on a 7 year old design when it was released. During that time you were free to run nearly any apple][ application (excluding the IIgs ones) despite many of them being 10+ years old. Their functionality wasn't reduced and you didn't have to deal with an OS that changed under the applications and dropped support for them. People understood the target and the applications were tuned for it (similar to game consoles). The advent of hard disks, and installable OS environments changed the model. Outside of zOS, and maybe IBMi, there simply aren't any OSs that actually have provided a fairly stable OS API over time. Even windows has decided they don't care about backwards compatibility despite the fact that for most purposes the core win32 API present in win2k provides basically everything needed to host the vast majority of modern applications. Games might be the exception but people forget the directX was an install-able component until MS decided to tie to to the OS with vista).

eropple 9y ago
> Even windows has decided they don't care about backwards compatibility I can run 25-year-old Windows 3.1 applications on a 32-bit Windows 10 box and they work correctly. If I have upgraded to 64-bit, I am merely constrained to 22-year-old Windows 95 applications.
pjmlp 9y ago
Unisys has ClearPath, going all the way to 1961.